ABSTRACT
Inequities and Social Justice In our daily rush to provide a seemingly endless succession of lessons, the larger issues of why we choose to teach oen get placed aside. I would like to suggest to you, however, that social justice is at the heart of the matter. When you look at it, the reason you became a teacher is to help people, to make the world a better place, and to address social inequities by giving your students some kind of intellectual advantage in the world. is might seem a bit idealistic, and it may seem to have little to do with the reading or writing lesson you are planning to give tomorrow. Nevertheless, in ten years of conducting educational research, I have come to realize that social justice issues are precisely why we wanted to become teachers (Costigan, 2004). Indeed, the educational research community at large is coming to realize that there is an overriding “why” people become teachers, and that is to nurture and open up new possibilities for young people (Cochran-Smith, 2004). We do not become teachers for summers o or a shortened work day; we become teachers because of a vision and a vocation to enable and empower our students. At the same time, the NCLB-inspired testing movement has as its purpose the elimination of educational, social, and economic inequities. Although we may have serious reservations about the way the law is implemented, we do agree with the purpose of NCLB, which is to address the fact that the United States remains a place of serious economic, cultural, and academic inequities which should be minimized or eliminated. I suggest in this chapter that one of the ways to prepare students for tests and to fulll our obligation towards social justice can be the heart of our teaching. By assisting our students to look at their local communities, or the issues that aect them, or various systems in which they operate, we can create an authentic curriculum which engages our students. And precisely because it is authentic learning, it can be a very eective means for test preparation.
